- The big black is a silent dialogue between Paolo Dolzan and Yu Jihan, a conversation of two masters on art and spatial distance. A distance that not only deals with the authors’ biography and geography: the contrast is between the Italian research in a figurative abstraction and an informal research of the sign. However, if you look beyond the Cartesian geometry, the outer limits of a single path - one in the signifier and the other in the meaning - find a point of contact in infinity, a match. So, black is their land of dialogue and understanding, perhaps sealed by the very mysterious incomprehension of the universe of signs and its contemplation. But black, the non-colour, also has a very ancient alchemical meaning: It is the colour of the "black work", of nigredo. The stage of purification, the first step into the alchemical pathway.

Dolzan’s unnamed portraits then bring on stage the pathway, the mysterious act of thinking, the matter that becomes conscious and capable of watching its own blurred face; expression, instead, is almost absent in the works by the Chinese master: The painting act becomes an abstract dance followed by the bear sign left on the white surface. A sign that is both painted and written, decidedly linked to ideographic Chinese language.

These two paintings are an interesting experiment of complementarity among cultures and viewpoints: Both inextricably tied to the history of their respective countries. These two researches look at darkness from different viewpoints, and yet they are both able to lead one to the crack, to the light in the bottom.

Both artists prefer the monochrome, where black is in itself a palette of shades; "Contrary to" they testify to Casella’s remark on the piano’s middle C, which contains in itself the harmonics of all other notes. Indeed, how can we but think of the white keyboard of such a classical instrument - as opposed to the shiny black of semitones – signs that wait to be beaten and stand as the beams of a fence, to remain in the moment of their rising and falling trajectories?

The Chinese tradition tells of calligraphers who, after years of practice, became the masters of the "Big Black", that is, they came to recreate the Universe on the ephemeral surface of impalpable rice paper, a difficult, elusive, mercurial and unpredictable medium - as the sky in the mind of a young woman.

Master Yu has tangibly conquered the Black of ink and the White of paper, recreating the coincidence of opposites in a Taoist duality.

On it travel the works of the Master and my very actions, which give reason for my Chinese name:

(Ni Bolu): bailiff of his people, he who shows the way on the Ocean’s ways.

Paolo Sabbatini

Director, Area for Cultural Promotion, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy